Sporting Cultures, 1650-1850

by Daniel O'Quinn (Editor), Alexis Tadie (Editor)

In the eighteenth century sport as we know it emerged as a definable social activity. Hunting and other country sports became the source of significant innovations in visual art; racing and boxing generated important subcultures; and sport’s impact on good health permeated medical, historical, and philosophical writings. Sporting Cultures, 1650–1850 is a collection of essays that charts important developments in the study of sport in the eighteenth century. Editors Daniel O’Quinn and Alexis Tadié have gathered together an array of European and North American scholars to critically examine the educational, political, and medical contexts that separated sports from other physical activities. The volume reveals how the mediation of sporting activities, through match reports, pictures, and players, transcended the field of aristocratic patronage and gave rise to the social and economic forces we now associate with sports. In Sporting Cultures, 1650–1850 , O’Quinn and Tadié successfully lay the groundwork for future research on the complex intersection of power, pleasure, and representation in sports culture.

376 pages, Hardcover

Published January 9, 2018

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sports history has been slow to the uptake of cultural history that has begun to gain ground in other branches of the field, but then sports history more than most is dominated by approaches from social history. It is also, to a very large extent, dominated by research focused on the era since the mid-1800s. These two characteristics combine to make this collection both distinctive and important: essays in the cultural history of sport between 1650 and 1850 – meaning that many of these pieces deal not so much with the phenomenon of sport-as-practice, but with its mediation and representation.

The collection is built around four key themes: early modern sport’s associations and invocation of the classical traditions, not only the classical world but also various classical literary forms and motifs; sporting animals; sport mediation; and the body in/and sport emphasising mainly medical and training aspects. In focusing on representation the collection deals to a large extent on the ways we understand and understood sport in this era, while in being historical the essays tend to emphasise what athletes did rather than some of the more abstract discussions we see in philosophical and historical sociological analyses. That is not to say that the essays suffer an excess of empiricism, with several essays richly exploring literary texts: O’Quinn on Lady Mary Whortly Montague’s letters on women's shooting games in Vienna and Ourida Mostefai’s essay on sport in Rousseau’s republic stand out in this regard, as does John Whale’s on early 19th century sports journalism and Sarah Cohen’s on paintings of animals at hunt.

The focus in the mid-17th to mid-19th centuries means that there is little that we usually think of as modern sport covered: there is an emphasis on mountaineering and horseracing with the presence of fencing, angling and boxing. The largest single emphasis is medical texts, which underpin all four essays in the ‘body’ section – two of which deal with training, one with the place of sports in medical debates of the period and one with the shifting interpretations of medical approaches to women and exercise during an era when the Galenic models of medicine were beginning to lose their dominance. Perhaps more than the other nine essays these four exploring medicine, training and the moving body challenge those of us whose work has a more recent focus to rethink some of our periodisations with, for instance, Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon’s paper on 17th and 18th medical discourses of women’s physicality adding depth to analyses such as Patricia Vertinsky’s Eternally Wounded Woman .

Vertinsky’s work is notable here also because although not referenced it is among the most compelling of the transnational histories of the modern sporting world – and it is this third element that adds to this collection’s importance. The product of an international collaboration between France and Canada drawing in US and UK based scholars, the collection has a decided transnational feel to it with most essays traversing national boundaries drawing out comparisons and commonalities, looking at debates and tendencies across modern national borders, although with a predominantly western European focus (even the paper emphasising Algeria is grounded mainly in French colonial aspects), while the coda, outside the era, looking at Himalayan climbing deals with many national impacts on a cross-border area while posing profound questions about the distinctions between sport and work reminding us that many of the questions of the explored in these essays deal with those who play and those who work at doing aspects of, or sometimes, the same thing.

The collection is compelling and significant, at least for those of us in academic sports history. Its major weakness is one shared by collection of this kind that emerge out of international collaborations: coherence. The focus on representation and mediation is tight but there are some papers where that focus could be tighter (Phil Dine’s on Algerian horse racing and Alexander Regier’s on athletic training most notably but even there if feels a little churlish to pull them up). All in all, highly recommended.